Going cashless or not – will we have a cashless world?
|30-8-2017 | Olivier Werlingshoff | GTNews |
In their article ‘Going cashless or not: are Central Banks resigning facing private companies?‘ GTNews and author Nathan Evans depict an image of a cashless world and the decline of Central Banks. With online shopping sites or GAFA companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) taking over with cashless payments because, as Nathan Evans writes, ‘the more cash disappears from our economies, the more money falls into their virtual pockets’ will we have a cashless world? We asked our expert Olivier Werlingshoff to give us his opinion about a possible disappearance of cash.
Alliance
According to Nathan Evans a surprising alliance is slowly coming together, in the global war on cash. Large internet-based companies and commercial banks are mixing interests with top-level governmental bodies to press for the disappearance of hard currency, and speed up the digital transition towards a cashless world. On the losing end of the intended shift, central banks which seem to be putting up feeble resistance. Private banks are fed up with the high costs and low profitability of managing cash and its expensive security services.The EU Commission discretely published its anti-cash measures on its website: “The establishment of a common cash control strategy upon entering or leaving the territory of the EU was a decisive step in the EU policy aimed at the strengthening of measures to prevent money laundering, terrorist financing and other illegal activities. One would have imagined that central banks and mints would be the first on the barricades to defend the national symbols bequeathed upon them , as they cease to exist if coins and banknotes dissappear. But so far, they have been remarkably feeble in their resistance.
Our expert Olivier Werlingshoff has read the articel and comes back with the following remarks:
I don’t think cash payments will disappear soon. At this moment 60% of all payments in Europe are done with cash. A few positive aspects of cash are:
- It is anonymous
- Secure
- A save haven
- It is a direct transaction
- And it helps budgeting
Two years ago I set up a test at a shop B2C to see what happened if during six weeks cash payments were not accepted. What happened was that the number of contactless payments increased but the total turnover of the shop decreased. After the test when cash was again accepted the turnover didn’t reached the level of before the test.
A few customers decided during the test to look for other shops where they could still pay with cash and decided after a few weeks not to come back.
For more information about this topic you can visit de website of G4S for the cash report: http://www.g4scashreport.com/
If you are interested to read the complete article at GTNews, please click on this link.
Owner of Werfiad
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